Comment by lol768 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lol768 | Hacker News Reader

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> It’s substantially harder to support railcards, and perform correct enforcement of them, with contactless cards. There’s no way of meaningfully marking a contactless card as being paired with a railcard, which would allow ticket inspectors to actually know that when performing enforcement. It would be come trivial for people to defraud TfL using railcards, if there was no mechanism for allowing spot checks on people travelling.

I'm not sure I buy this. Aren't TfL given privileged access to be able to retrieve back the FPAN (or if not that, a customer-specific Payment Account Reference, as defined by EMVCo)? If they weren't, the Contactless travel history portal wouldn't be able to display travel journey undertaken using Apple/Google Pay - and yet this usecase does work, so clearly there is a capability to associate payments made using different DPANs and the underlying physical card and to recognise those transactions are belonging to a single customer.

Subsequently, there is clearly a customer-specific identifier that TfL could, if it desired to do so, tie together with a record which states the customer owns a railcard (after validating the railcard number using the National Rail API).

Why do you think RID2 wouldn't be able to ask a server to check this at inspection time?

> Aren't TfL given privileged access to be able to retrieve back the FPAN

Yes they are.

> Why do you think RID2 wouldn't be able to ask a server to check this at inspection time?

I don’t. But RID2 is brand new, and they only finished the complete rollout last year. I don’t know why you expect TfL to immediately start supporting railcards, and it doesn’t change the fact that for the majority of the time that TfL has supported contactless, it’s not been possible for them to validate railcard association with their original RID.

Nothing you’ve said in anyway support your original assertion that TfL’s contactless system was deliberately designed to not support railcards, and certainly doesn’t support your implied assertion that TfL doesn’t support railcards on contactless for nefarious purposes, as opposed to simply not having the technology developed.

> Yes they are.

Right, so when you said "there’s no way of meaningfully marking a contactless card as being paired with a railcard", there was nothing of substance to actually support that assertion.

What you've proven to me is that TfL are in exactly the position where they could deliver this if they wanted to and put their minds to it, but it nonetheless hasn't happened. Just like Oval (how late is that now?)

I am quite cynical about TfL, yes, and suspect that they just see this as likely to cause a financial hit when it comes to revenue, which is probably why it hasn't been prioritised. The status quo is a convenient one. I'm sure it'll happen one day when the tech debt of Oyster forces it to happen, but it won't be done proactively for passenger benefit.

> Right, so when you said "there’s no way of meaningfully marking a contactless card as being paired with a railcard", there was nothing of substance to actually support that assertion.

Yes there is, if you bother to actual read my comment, you’ll note I was referring to the ability to store the railcard flag on the actual card, so it’s easy for the RID to know if person is travelling with a discount.

> What you've proven to me is that TfL are in exactly the position where they could deliver this if they wanted to and put their minds to it, but it nonetheless hasn't happened.

Well that’s simply not true[1]. Also you might have been aware of a recent global pandemic that occurred, and completely flattened TfLs finances, and has basically forced them to abandon any future looking projects, and focus on just keeping the lights on. You seem to expect an awful lot from a transport agency that just spent 3 years fighting for its own survival, while central government did everything in its power to destroy it.

> I am quite cynical about TfL, yes, and suspect that they just see this as likely to cause a financial hit when it comes to revenue, which is probably why it hasn't been prioritised. The status quo is a convenient one. I'm sure it'll happen one day when the tech debt of Oyster forces it to happen, but it won't be done proactively for passenger benefit.

That’s unfortunate, but it say more about you, than it does about TfL. Go and spend any serious amount of time in any other major city, and you’ll be much more grateful for what TfL provides. Even more so when you realise that TfL is the only transit agency in the developed world that is inexplicably required to cover all its costs from the fair box and advertising. Even US transit agency, in a country notorious for its strong cultural dislike for public transit, provides more government support to its transit agencies than the UK does to TfL.

[1] https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/more-railway-stations-a...

The link you've provided (August 2024) pre-dates TfL's announcement of an indefinite delay to Oval Phase 1 [1] which was originally scheduled to happen by the end of 2022.

The switch on did not happen on September 22nd, 2024 - and the previous date in March was also missed.

[1] https://x.com/c2c_rail/status/1834254076151832814

Are you trying to suggest that TfL are using are a cyber attack as cover to permanently cancel Oval?

Also, once again you seemed have forgotten that COVID happened 2020-2022. Are you also trying to seriously suggest that TfL pausing all non-essential services and projects during a pandemic was a nefarious act to avoid rolling out project Oval, and by extension avoid having to support railcards on contactless transactions?

You honestly don’t seem to have any real grasp of how long project like Oval actually take to implement. A large transport project overrunning deadlines by a few years is hardly unusual. It’s certainly no evidence of some grand conspiracy to avoid supporting railcards (which again, TfL are under no obligation to support anyway).

> Are you trying to suggest that TfL are using are a cyber attack as cover to permanently cancel Oval?

I'm suggesting it likely would've been delayed anyway, based on how the project was going prior to the cyber attack, and the cyber attack is the latest convenient reason for it not being rolled out according to the (already behind) schedule.

It's not just Oval, it very much appears from an external perspective that most projects that TfL touch don't get done on time or completed to the promised standard. There are countless examples, the 4G/5G coverage rollout on the underground is yet another: https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/lu-elizabeth-line-4g-up...

It's tiresome to see repeatedly happening.

> You honestly don’t seem to have any real grasp of how long project like Oval actually take to implement

I don't think the timeframes in the original tender were that unrealistic, and to be clear, the tender was published well after the lifting of the Covid-19 lockdown restrictions in the UK. If TfL didn't think those timescales were realistic, it shouldn't have bid for the contract.

What I have heard are - if true - some truly ridiculous stories (manual fares data entry, instead of automated ingest of the NR fares data, which already has all of the PAYG fares) about how this is being implemented, which would explain a lot about some of the reasons behind the delays if correct. It's certainly not the fault of the TOCs involved, that's for sure.

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